Physics

Russian author Gennady Belimov published an article in which he described experiments led by Vadim Chernobrov, the inventor of a time machine in 1987. Chernobrov claims his machine can slow or speed up the course of time by tinkering with the Earth’s magnetic field…

Amazing to think the universe has “cosmic bruises.” Via Technology Review’s Physics arXiv blog: There’s something exciting afoot in the world of cosmology. Last month, Roger Penrose at the University of Oxford…

From BBC’s Bang Goes The Theory: “If you had three people sun-bathing, they would collect that amount of sunshine, [and] despite having to travel 93 million miles, [that amount of] energy from the sun can melt rock.”

I admire his desire to develop a parachute in the early days of aviation, unfortunately Mr. Reichelt may have turned out to be the world’s first-ever BASE jumper. As Wikipedia records:

Believing that the lack of a suitably high test platform was partially to blame for his failures, Reichelt repeatedly petitioned the Parisian Prefecture of Police for permission to conduct a test from the Eiffel Tower. He was finally granted permission in early 1912, but when he arrived at the tower on February 4th he made it clear that he intended to jump himself rather than conduct an experiment with dummies.

Despite attempts by his friends and spectators to dissuade him, he jumped from the first platform of the tower wearing his invention. The parachute failed to deploy and he crashed into the icy ground at the foot of the tower. The next day, newspapers were full of the story of the reckless inventor and his fatal jump — many included pictures of the fall taken by press photographers who had gathered to witness Reichelt’s experiment — and a film documenting the jump appeared in newsreels:

Our universe was created after the occurrence of the Big Bang. Humans have successfully reenacted mini Big Bangs. Does this mean we could create mini universes? From The Telegraph: The reaction created…

Stephen Hawking says the Big Bang was the result of the inevitable laws of physics and did not need God to spark the creation of the Universe — reported in the Telegraph:

The scientist has claimed that no divine force was needed to explain why the Universe was formed.

In his latest book, The Grand Design, an extract of which is published in Eureka magazine in The Times, Hawking said: “Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the Universe exists, why we exist.”

He added: “It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the Universe going.”…

Alasdair Wilkins writes on io9.com: A new theory explains the accelerating universe without invoking mysterious, unseen dark energy to account for the expansion. But it also gets rid of singularities, an unchanging…

Fascinating developments from the Large Hadron Collider, as the BBC reports that the so-called “God particle” has been simulated as sound: Scientists have simulated the sounds set to be made by sub-atomic…

Karen Field reports that theoretical physicist Ronald Mallett is on a lifelong mission to build a time machine. His theory of a time machine, based on Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, involves creating…

There is something strange in the cosmic neighbourhood. An unknown object in the nearby galaxy M82 has started sending out radio waves, and the emission does not look like anything seen anywhere in the universe before.

The thing appeared in May last year, while Muxlow and his colleagues were monitoring an unrelated stellar explosion in M82 using the MERLIN network of radio telescopes in the UK. A bright spot of radio emission emerged over only a few days, quite rapidly in astronomical terms. Since then it has done very little except baffle astrophysicists.

It certainly does not fit the pattern of radio emissions from supernovae: they usually get brighter…

Now this is entertainment. But here’s the real life physics behind it (click here). Stephen Tauban writes on his blog:

Last year, I discovered the wonderfully cheezy and sharky movie: Mega Shark Vs. Giant Octopus. While it certainly appealed to a more straight-to-DVD niche market of creature-feature enthusiasts, it wasn’t half bad. Pretty laughable in parts … well actually, in most parts when you consider the wooden acting and crap computer animation. However the most ridiculous scene has to be when Mega Shark takes down a commercial jetliner that is cruising over the middle of the ocean. It was this moment that took the movie from being a little ho-hum to “holy shit, did that shark just eat a plane!?” Check out the clip:

It’s pretty incredible when you think about it. I mean, how the hell did it do that? What would it require for a shark the size of a plane to launch itself out of the water and take down a moving aircraft? After reviewing some of my basic physics calculations I came up with some pretty startling figures. However, it didn’t feel like I would be doing such an epic event justice with just a basic blog post, which meant it was time to do what I love most: an infographic! I had been itching to do one for a while now, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity. So with all that said, check out the resulting design below. Oh, and just click on the image to download the full size PDF version for the smaller details.

Vlad Tarko writes on Softpedia: According to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, a moving mass should create another field, called gravitomagnetic field, besides its static gravitational field. This field has now been…

Joining Art Bell for the entire 4-hour program, physicist Dr. David Anderson discussed the state of time technology from his research, as well as other labs around the world. He recapped his work from 2002, when he last appeared with Art on the show. At that juncture, his team had created small time warp fields that he said could accelerate time by 300% within the field, as well as reversing time. He described the initiation of a time warp field as quite spectacular to witness, “between the combinations of different chemical reagents and high energy lasers we use to excite or initiate a time warp field…a lot of light, a lot of energy.”

Since 2002, the effects have increased by “two orders of magnitudes,” both in time acceleration and retardation rates, and living organisms have been successfully tested in the warp fields, he detailed. By regenerating “closed timelike curves” (bending spacetime so time loops back on itself) we’re finding it “just as easy to move backwards in time as well as forward,” Anderson explained.

A new interactive program reveals the spectacular light show you’d see if you dared to wander close to a black hole. It demonstrates how the extreme gravity of a black hole could appear to shred background constellations of stars, spinning them around as though in a giant black washing machine.

The program’s creators say it could be an excellent tool to familiarise people with the weird ways that black holes warp light. “It’s useful for people to play around with the parameters to study how, for instance, a black hole would distort the constellation Orion,” says Thomas Müller of the University of Stuttgart in Germany.

With a massive blizzard going on in the Northeastern U.S., water (albeit in a frozen form) is on everyone’s mind in this part of the world. Very interesting article, whether you are snowed in or not. Edwin Cartlidge writes in New Scientist:

We are confronted by many mysteries, from the nature of dark matter and the origin of the universe to the quest for a theory of everything. These are all puzzles on the grand scale, but you can observe another enduring mystery of the physical world — equally perplexing, if not quite so grand — from the comfort of your kitchen. Simply fill a tall glass with chilled water, throw in an ice cube and leave it to stand.

The fact that the ice cube floats is the first oddity. And the mystery deepens if you take a thermometer and measure the temperature of the water at various depths. At the top, near the ice cube, you’ll find it to be around 0 °C, but at the bottom it should be about 4 °C. That’s because water is denser at 4°C than it is at any other temperature — another strange trait that sets it apart from other liquids.